When a writer’s musical about her experience in treatment is co-opted by a powerhungry producer, Chasing Grace becomes a meta-theatrical exploration of who gets to tell our stories, what it costs to stay true to your voice, and the constant, courageous process of recovering out loud.
The show we all fell in love with at the SheNYC Summer Theater Festival in 2023 is taking the next step: we’re thrilled to announce that SheNYC Arts will produce the premiere Off-Broadway run of Elizabeth Addison’s new musical, Chasing Grace, in March 2026.
We’re returning to the A.R.T./New York Mezzanine Theatre (where you saw our last off-Broadway run of Bloodshot and Fort Huachuca)!
Moving fluidly between a treatment facility, memory, and the rehearsal room, CHASING GRACE is a meta-musical about recovery, authorship, and the cost of telling the truth out loud. With a score blending contemporary musical theatre, pop, and R&B, the show holds space for grief, rage, joy, absurdity, and hard-won laughter, capturing the lived reality of women navigating addiction, healing, and self-definition.
The show follows a writer as she sorts through the memories of her time in early recovery inside a women’s treatment facility, where survival meant learning how to stay, how to listen, and how not to run. As the writer shapes her treatment experience into a new musical, memory and rehearsal collide. The women she once lived beside reappear, not as cautionary tales, but as full, complex human beings whose stories demand dignity, humor, and care.
As the musical’s workshops succeed and industry attention grows, the writer is pulled into a familiar danger zone: external validation, creative compromise, and the seductive belief that success will finally make her feel whole. Pressure mounts to reshape the story into something more “palatable,” more marketable, and less honest. The farther she moves from the truth of her recovery, the closer she comes to losing it.
Photos from the 2023 SheNYC Festival Production of CHASING GRACE.
Produced by SheNYC Arts, featuring orchestrations by Angela Ortiz, music direction by Dave Klodowski and recorded at the woman-owned MONOLisa Studios, this album is a sneak peek at the magic of Chasing Grace. Get excited – there’s even more stunning music that will take the stage in March 2026!
Stream the soundtrack today on your favorite platform:
We can’t do this without your help: our commitment to affordable, representative theater requires resources. All donations to this production are tax-deductible.
Donate below, or reach out to us at development@shenycarts.org to talk about sponsorship & producer opportunities!
ABOUT US
She NYC Arts is a femme-led nonprofit organization fighting for gender equity in the theater industry and the entertainment industry at large.
We know that what audiences watch in plays, musicals, films, and TV shows helps mold the way they see the world around them – and we want audiences to see shows by women & femme artists, telling our stories through our lens.
We focus most of our support on the original creators — playwrights, composers, and producers — to get more women, trans, and non-binary people in these roles that decide which stories get told on stage and screen.
MEET THE WRITER
ELIZABETH ADDISON (Book, Music, Lyrics, & Director) is an award-winning multi-hyphenate whose work exists at the intersection of recovery and the performing arts. She has written three musicals inspired by her recovery journey, one of which, “Chasing Grace,” is set to have an Off-Broadway run in 2026 and will be produced by SheNYC. Recently, she was the scriptwriter on two shows at the 92Y celebrating the songs and legacy of Jonathan Larson and Holland-Dozier-Holland. Elizabeth is a creative recovery coach, story coach, and trauma-informed facilitator with The Meghann Perry Group where she facilitates Recovery Storytelling, Embodied Storytelling and Embodied Songwriting workshops. She is also a consultant for The Opioid Response Network (ORN) and The Resident Artist at The Grayken Center in Boston. Elizabeth travels the world performing and giving keynotes on the role creativity, play, music and theatre has in recovery. This past summer, she was in Aotearoa, New Zealand, performing with Recovery Street. Follow Elizabeth’s journey at Elizabethspeaks.com
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